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What is the most common gaming resolution these days? 1080p? 1440p? 4K? Despite the graphical splendour of a high-resolution monitor—and don't get me wrong, I
love
me a high-resolution monitor—for the vast majority of people, 1080p is still king. Valve's Steam Hardware Survey, while not definitive, places 1080p desktop and laptop resolution share at 34 percent, followed by 720p at 26 percent. With just over
one percent
share, 1440p i doesn't even get a look in.
That's why, for the longest time, the big sellers at Nvidia and AMD haven't been flagship cards like the GTX 980 Ti or R9 Fury. Instead, it's cards in the sub-£200 bracket that make up the bulk of sales. For Nvidia, that's been the likes of the GTX 650, GTX 750 Ti, and GTX 960, while AMD has the likes of the R7 370 and R9 380. Now, Nvidia's adding another card to that potentially lucrative pile in the form of the GTX 950, a £129 ($159) graphics card that promises to be the mainstream card of choice for 1080p gaming.
Of course, Nvidia said that about the GTX 960 as well, and while that was a fine performer—often hitting a solid 60 FPS at high and ultra settings at 1080p—it wasn't exactly what you'd call an exciting graphics card. Competing AMD products like the R9 280 offered similar or better performance with higher-bandwidth memory, and more of it, albeit at the cost of power efficiency. The GTX 950 has its work cut out for it to stay relevant, and Nvidia knows it.
That's why, aside from touting its 1080p gaming credentials, Nvidia's going for the rather unusual move of pushing the 950 as a card for MOBAs: multiplayer online battle arenas, such as
Dota 2
,
League of Legends
, etc.
For the vast majority of MOBAs, a beefy graphics card isn't really required. Most are designed to run across a wide range of PCs and laptops, including those with integrated graphics. For the most part, you don't really
need
a discrete GPU to play a MOBA.
However, Nvidia's betting on those very same people getting hooked on their MOBA of choice, and—even if they don't turn completely pro—will at least be looking for some sort of competitive advantage online. The 950 is intended to fill that gap, by providing a cheap way to get higher than 60 FPS gameplay out of a MOBA—as high as 120 FPS in some cases, Nvidia claims—reducing the time between frames, and thus potentially giving the gamer an advantage.
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The specs
Of course, you can get over 60 FPS in MOBAs with a range of cheap GPUs, not just the 950, so it's up to the rest of specs to sell the card. The 950 uses the GM206 chip—the same chip used in the 960—but with a few bits disabled. You get fewer CUDA cores and texture units, while the core clock and memory speeds take a slight hit. Otherwise, it's business as usual, with 32 ROPs, 2GB of GDDR5 RAM, and a 128-bit memory interface.
Specs at a glance:
GTX 960 (Maxwell)
GTX 950 (Maxwell)
GTX 750 Ti (Maxwell)
GTX 650 (Kepler)
GTX 550 Ti (Fermi)
CUDA Cores
1024
768
640
384
192
Texture Units
64
48
40
32
32
ROPs
32
32
16
16
24
Core Clock
1126MHz
1024MHz
1020MHz
900MHz
900MHz
Boost Clock
1178MHz
1188MHz
1085MHz
1250MHz
n/a
Memory Bus Width
128-bit
128-bit
128-bit
128-bit
192-bit
Memory Speed
7GHz
6.6GHz
5.4GHz
5GHz
4.1GHz
Memory Bandwidth
112GB/s
105.6GB/s
86.4GB/s
80GB/s
98.4GB/s
Memory Size
2/4GB GDDR5
2GB GDDR5
2GB GDDR5
1/2GB GDDR5
1GB GDDR5
TDP
120W
90W
60W
64W
116W
Enlarge
Those coming from a 650, or even a 550, will see a huge boost in performance with a 950, just based on the specs alone. The 950 also features support for DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1—that's the likes of volume tiled resources, conservative raster, and raster ordered views—as well as a built-in H.265 (HEVC) encoder and decoder. And, in a move that'll please HTPC builders everywhere, the 950's HDMI port supports HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2—features that are still strangely missing from many of
AMD's cards. There's even support for two-way SLI.There's no reference design for the 950, so it's up to Nvidia's partners to attach a suitable cooler. With just a 90W TDP to try and dissipate—handled by just a single six-pin power connector—there's not a whole lot that actually needs cooling, which means there are options ranging from teeny tiny single-fan cards, all the way through to longer dual-fan cards with beefier heatpipes that mean the fans rarely need to spin up at all. The Gigabyte version of the card we tested sits somewhere in the middle, with a short PCB and two smaller fans.
Connectivity wise, the Gigabyte GTX 950 comes equipped with two dual-link DVI ports, one DisplayPort, and one HDMI port. Up to four displays can be hooked up at any one time, with a maximum resolution of 5K (5120×3200). The 950 also supports
the shiny new GeForce Experience
features Nvidia recently unveiled, including ShadowPlay for DVR recording of your gameplay, and GameStream co-op for sharing your game with friends over the Internet.
Benchmarks
TEST SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
OS
Windows 8.1
CPU
Intel Core i7-5960X 8-core
RAM
16GB Corsair DDR4 at 3200MHz
HDD
2x500GB Crucial M550 SSDs in Raid 0
Motherboard
EVGA X99 micro
Power Supply
Corsair HX1200i
Cooling
Corsair H100i liquid cooler
To test the GTX 950, we ran it through the standard Ars UK selection of games:
Shadow of Mordor
,
Bioshock Infinite
,
Metro Last Light
,
Battlefield 4
,
Crysis 3
, and
Far Cry 4
. While the 950 is not a card designed for maxed-out settings (as the results show below), everything was cranked for consistency. Resolution was limited to 1440p at the high-end; again, the card isn't really designed for it, but it might be interesting to see how it handles a few more pixels being chucked at it. Obviously, in real-world usage, you'll have to turn down the settings a little to get a consistent 60 FPS (or 30 FPS in the case of
Crysis 3
).
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While we've moved to frame times and 99th percentile testing for many GPU tests using the new Ars UK benchmarking PC, unfortunately we haven't yet been able to go back and update the legacy benchmarks with the new methodology and PC specs. The 950 will likely be the last GPU tested using the old method, which involved benchmarking in FRAPS and then taking an average FPS score from three runs.
Verdict
The GTX 950 sits at the bottom of what is—aside from the madness of
the 980 Ti compared to the Titan X
—a well-balanced product stack. Tucked just behind the more expensive GTX 960 (which goes for around £165, $200 for a 2GB version), it offers much of the 960's performance for £35 ($50) less, letting you run a wide range of games at 1080p at high and medium settings with no trouble at all. It'll even do ultra settings at a push, too.
As a value proposition, the GTX 950 is far more exciting than the 960 ever was. For a 21 percent drop in price, there's only around a 15 percent drop in performance in worst-case scenarios, and often no performance difference at all. You also get a physically cooler card with the drop in TDP to 90W. For the Gigabyte card that we tested, that drop in TDP resulted in a very quiet card, even when running at full whack during benchmarking.
The only sticking point for some will be the 2GB of VRAM. Graphics memory requirements are on the rise across the board, and it's only going to get worse as time goes on. For the current crop of games at 1080p, the GTX 950 is more than capable. But if you're looking for something that'll last you a little longer, then it's worth considering spending the extra cash for something like the GTX 960 or R9 380, both of which have 4GB options. The R9 380 is a wee bit faster too for the most part (
according to Tom's Hardware
), although, the 950 comfortably beats it's nearest price competitor the R7 370.
The GTX 950 is a card for the people, and a very capable one at that. It's a low-power workhorse that'll do its job with a minimum of fuss.
The good
Near GTX 960 performance for less cash
Low 90W TDP means the card should run cool and quiet
Strong software and driver support with GeForce Experience
The bad
Needing to upgrade in year, because 2GB of VRAM isn't enough
